A new report from Aite Group analyzes the market position of 15 IT services vendors that provide to life insurance, property & casualty insurance, and health insurance companies. The report provides technology buyers with a clear view of where each vendor fits in terms of domain expertise, service areas, and geographic scope, and highlights ways in which participants behave similarly or are obviously unique in their approach to servicing insurance carriers.
Among other findings, the report reveals that core policy administration replacement and modernization are critical areas of engagement for IT services vendors servicing the insurance vertical. The report also finds that most IT services vendors surveyed have considerable room to grow their presence with insurance firms in the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America. While the Asia-Pacific region beckons because of the sheer scale of its actual and potential markets, Latin America is wide open for a firm to claim first-mover advantage, and offers relative linguistic and cultural homogeneity.
“By and large, IT services vendors are currently better differentiated by IT offerings (advanced IT services, basic IT services, etc.) than by insurance domain expertise (policy administration, underwriting, etc.),” says Gwenn Bzard, research director with Aite Group and co-author of this report. “Vendors need to focus on building domain expertise differentiation; a lack of it will impede their ability to move up the value chain, forcing them to compete on relationships and price.”
The report is based on Aite Group’s global survey of 26 providers of IT services to the financial services industry. Of these, 15 offer services to the insurance industry: Cognizant, CSC, Exigen, HCL, Infosys, Logica, Mastek, Neoris, NS Solutions, Patni, Polaris, SunGard, Syntel, Unisys, and Wipro.
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